Well, hey, if Scotland can release murderous terrorists to Libya, Libya can certainly do the same, right?  Moammar Ghaddafi’s son, the same man who gave Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi a hero’s welcome when he landed in Tripoli after serving just 11 days for every victim of his attack on Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, arranged for the release of 88 terrorists linked to al-Qaeda through his Islamic Foundation:

Libya on Thursday freed 88 Islamists with Al-Qaeda links from Abu Slim prison in Tripoli, an AFP correspondent at the scene reported.

“45 members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and 43 members of other jihadist groups were freed thanks to the efforts of the Islamic Foundation,” lawyers’ groups said in a joint statement with the Foundation, headed by Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi’s son Seif al-Islam.

It’s not as if Libya didn’t understand the connections to AQ, either:

“Apart from the LIFG members, the other people freed were former Al-Qaeda members who were active in Afghanistan or Iraq,” Saleh Saleh Abdessalem, an aide to Seif al-Islam, told AFP.

Five years ago, Ghaddafi fell all over himself to put himself in the good graces of the US after watching us uproot Saddam Hussein from a rathole in Tikrit.  He disclosed Libya’s nascent nuclear program and its connection to the AQ Khan network and dismantled it, sending us the parts for verification.  He pledged to fight international terrorism and stop supporting it.

Now, in the era of “smart power” and reset buttons, Ghaddafi not only releases radical Islamist terrorists, he announces to the world that he’s letting al-Qaeda terrorists get back to the battlefield.  Iraq certainly has to worry that the AQI terrorists will return to bolster the tattered remnants of the foreign insurgency, which has been all but forgotten of late here in the US with the Afghanistan question still left unresolved.  Of course, Libya will let the Afghanistan-based AQ terrorists get back to that battlefield, too.

If Scotland thought they had bargained for anything more than oil contracts, they should be embarrassed, although they should be embarrassed by Megrahi’s release in any circumstance.  Ghaddafi is back to supporting terrorists openly and without any hint of embarrassment of his own.  It seems he has gotten over his fear of the US lately.